aikido budo and japanese culture

black teeth and aubergine

as shiny as if freshly laid
You are a melancholy fruit.
Solanum Melongena.
Every animal is sad
after eggplant.Erica Jong, The Eggplant Epithalamion

It is a sort of dream, which coincides With the pacific relaxations called Preferred Reality. Men who forget Lovingly chopped-up cloves of ail, who scorn The job of slicing two good peppers thinly, Then two large onions and six aubergines – Those long, impassioned and imperial purples – Which, with six courgettes, you sift with saltDouglas Dunn, Ratatouille

Eggplant, the bruise-fruit, heals in a darkroom as photographs of contusions develop.

Gathered in a farmer’s truck, eggplants appear ready to travel into outer space, there to visit purple planets in our galaxy.

The mayor has disappeared. He was last seen getting into a taxicab near the produce-market. He was accompanied by an eggplant, which he carried in a burgundy valise.

Shiny, soft, and smooth, eggplants suggest patent-leather shoes worn by a species whose feet differ from ours in certain respects.

Although I dislike eating its slippery flesh, I pay aubergine certain respects.

There is eggplant. There it is – a pliable stone sitting in purple patience waiting for us to go away.Hans Ostrom, Aubergine

Back at Nijo, his Murasaki, now on the eve of womanhood, was very pretty indeed. So red could after all be a pleasing color, he thought. She was delightful, at artless play in a soft cloak of white lined with red. Because of her grandmother’s conservative preferences, her teeth had not yet been blackened or her eyebrows plucked.Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji

no money no things no teeth just meSantoka Taneda

I’m writing this from Belgium. I’ll be based in Europe for a while doing some work for the EU. Things have been hectic and I’ve been too busy for the last few weeks to think about writing something interesting here. Sorry for that. Hopefully I’ll be able to write regularly from now. Perhaps I’ll write about aikido more from a European perspective in the future but for now there are lots of things about Japanese culture that I still want to write about. But it does mean that I’ll be travelling a little in Europe and teaching some aikido seminars. I hope I can meet some of you.

I got some black toothpaste in Japan. Really. Black toothpaste. Deep, dark black. It’s made from aubergines. They are called eggplants in the USA. The French word aubergine is such a beautiful name for a vegetable. Or a colour. The aubergine is in the nightshade family. Night and shade – darker than dark. The toothpaste is supposed to be very natural and healthy and good for your gums and teeth.

In Japan women used to blacken their teeth when they came of age. Blackening the teeth is called ohaguro. It is mentioned in the above quote from The Tale of Genji from the eleventh century. The custom of ohaguro continued until the late nineteenth century.

Teeth are very important in the martial arts. You naturally clench your teeth at the instant of a throw in aikido or judo. Whether you are throwing or being thrown. Or you clench your teeth at the moment of a strike or a block in karate or the sword. Some dentists recommend wearing a mouthguard or gumshield during any martial arts training. I wrote about teeth a while ago in http://www.aikiweb.com/blogs/moon-in…51/teeth-4155/ after I walked past a dentist next door to a chocolate shop in Tokyo. I’m not sure if that was symbiotic irony or ironic symbiosis.

Santoka Taneda was a twentieth-century haiku zen poet. His simple, direct haiku are still very popular today.

Welcome back Niall, I’m sure my readers will be very happy to read you again. I like the aubergine poem of Hans Ostrom a lot, reminds me of Pablo Neruda. Didn’t know about blackening teeth, just the opposite from here, the whiter the teeth the better, the other day I went in a chinese shop and they were talking that chinese women like a white skin and here in Europe it is the opposite, they cannot get enough sun here on the beach. About the clenching of the teeth in martial arts, its a relaxing thing, I think.